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As Steamboat Dan explained, this long line of argosies had been brought to a standstill by laying an iron bar across so as to detain the little rubber-rafts while the stream ran on. Inspector Val had tripped over this bar. Remove the detaining iron bar, and the released flotilla would sail downward to the mouth of the drain and deliver its yellow freight of gold to whomsoever waited to receive it.
The poor Capriotes' "bread-winner" had gone the way of Antonio's argosies another whet to the all-devouring appetite, for which nothing that swims is too large or too small.
It was essentially a middle-aged devotion, and bore the same resemblance to the picturesque passion of five-and- twenty that a snow-fed torrent does to a navigable river. The one rushes and roars and sweeps away the bridges and devastates happy homes, while the other bears upon its placid breast the argosies of peace and plenty and is generally serviceable to the necessities of man.
He ascertained by his spies, sent in this and subsequently in other directions, as well as by occasional merchantmen spoken with at sea, that the Portuguese fleet for India would not be ready to sail for many weeks; that no valuable argosies were yet to be looked for from America, but that a great war-fleet, comprising many galleons of the largest size, was at that very moment cruising in the Straits of Gibraltar.
The whole scene is at once picturesque and animated and suggests great activity. We must remember, however, that where now are these massive piers with their richly laden ships and noble argosies, as far back only as 1849 there were no stable docks, no properly constructed wharfs, no convenient landing places.
The crew stand and row long oars and sing as they swing, and you think of Vikings, Pirates, and Argosies.... But down in the lower deck beside Denny's engines it feels quite homely, as if you were going "doon the water" in sunny June the engines running as smoothly and quietly as if they were muscles and bones instead of hard steel and 900 H.-P. engineers, engines, and hull all frae Glasgie, all from banks of old Cleutha.
But it is not the millionaire who set me thinking; it is the harassed man of business; and what I am wondering is, whether, in sober truth and earnestness, it is possible for him, as he shuts his library door and finds himself inside, to forget his rebuffs and anxieties his maturing bills and overdue argosies and to lose himself over a favourite volume.
Mark the successful man, the merchant prince with argosies on every sea, the employer of thousands of hands, the munificent contributor to public charities, the churchwarden, the member of parliament, and the generous patron of his relatives his self-approbation struggling with the instinctive sense of baseness in the money-hunter, the ignorant and greedy filcher of the labor of others, the seller of his own mind and manhood for luxuries and delicacies that he was too lowlived to enjoy, and for the society of people who made him feel his inferiority at every turn."
Ross went off to deliver Lyceum lectures and Chautauqua addresses and club chit-chats on the blessings of selling more soap or underwear; and for the magazines he wrote prose poems about stars, and sympathy, and punch, and early rising, and roadside flowers, and argosies, and farming, and saving money.
Late afternoon of the same day was the hour agreed upon for the Judgment. Baahaabaa had sent invitations by express swimmers to all the near-by islands. He invited the entire archipelago. The picture of their approach was interesting. Kippy haled me to the top of a tall tree whence we watched the convergent argosies, hundreds of tiny specks each bearing an outspread taa-taa of gleaming leaves.
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